Hip-Hop is the largest youth culture in the history of the planet rock. It has produced generations of artists who have revolutionized their genre(s) by applying the aesthetic innovations of the culture. The BreakBeat Poets features 78 poets, born somewhere between 1961-1999, All-City and Coast-to-Coast, who are creating the next and now movement(s) in American letters. This is the first poetry anthology by and for the Hip-Hop generation. It is for people who love Hip-Hop, for fans of the culture, for people who’ve never read a poem, for people who thought poems were only something done by dead white dudes who got lost in a forest, and for poetry heads. This anthology is meant to expand the idea of who a poet is and what a poem is for.
The BreakBeat Poets are the scribes recording and remixing a fuller spectrum of experience of what it means to be alive in this moment. The BreakBeat Poets are a break with the past and an honoring of the tradition(s), an undeniable body expanding the canon for the fresher.

http://www.breakbeatpoets.com

“A cool & diversified version of a mix tape. The BreakBeat Poets is a thorough and complete summation of Golden Era writers who continue to build the scene of literary and performance poetry.”
—Chance The Rapper

“The BreakBeat Poets book release party is more than a poetry reading, as the anthology itself is more than a compilation of iambic pentameter. It starts with the editors, two of whom are the city’s most illustrious performance poets, Kevin Coval and Quraysh Ali Lansana, the perfect creative minds to oversee this book created for the hip-hop community.”
–Chicago Tribune

“[T]he first definitive anthology of poems by poets who fuse together the aesthetic of hip-hop and the style of slam poetry with the written-word tradition… [a] dynamic, groundbreaking, genre-merging volume.”
–Booklist

“The Breakbeat Poets presents the struggle-born whispers, joyous shouts, and hopeful flows of a beautiful multitude four decades in the making. Here are the voices of a movement that just won’t stop. For the urgent midnight roar of the people’s poetry and the glimpses of freshly conjured dawns awaiting their own breaks—this book is nothing short of essential.”
—Jeff Chang, author of Can’t Stop: Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation and Who We Be: The Colorization of America

]]>0kevinhttp://kevincoval.com/kc/?p=3902014-09-15T12:59:18Z2014-09-15T12:59:18Zs/o Kent Martin and the movement and family in Tulsa, OK
this is a few years ago but still applicable for teachers & students

“We have a vision and hope for this city, this summer, that we can make Chicago fresher and more just and more equitable. We are building ONE Chicago, countering the vision of the architects and urban planners and mayors who grow the gap between the city of saved and city of the damned. We imagine and work toward ONE city that is de-segregated like the culture we make. THIS is a Chicago tradition too, a mix of House music and The Haymarket Riot, a new public square, for all who are here and ALL who will come.” – Kevin Coval
The project began after Kevin collaborated with Chicago’s Cultural Commissioner Michelle Boone on a poem for the launch event of Choose Chicago. After hearing the poem, Lou Razin, from Broadway in Chicago, encouraged Kevin to write the city a new anthem. Kevin brought a young, new soul band from Chicago, The O’My’s, into the writing process, and worked with their producers, Blended Babies to record the song. Long-time friend and supporter Joe Shanahan at the Metro introduced the team to Josephine Lee from the Chicago Children’s Choir, who lace the chorus. The visuals were created with director Jay Caves from Heart of the City.

(CNN) — Rahm Emanuel is building a Second City. Two cities really, as the “two summers” theme shown in Episode 4 of “Chicagoland” suggests. One white, one black. One for the rich, one for the poor. One for private schools, one for closed schools. A new Chicago for the saved and the damned. Gold coast heavens and low-end hells. It’s biblical, binary.

TICKETS WILL BE FREE & AVAILABLE FROM THE SECOND CITY BOX OFFICE SOON!

“As a poet once observed, “Poetry is the music of facts.” Kevin Coval’s poetry rings with that music. From the grit and turmoil of everyday life, Coval constructs a new beauty that inspires and transforms.” BERNIE SAHLINS, FOUNDER of The Second City & Author of Days and Nights at The Second City: A Memoir

why jews celebrate x-mas
i. it’s the only time of the year all my mom’s people could get off work.
ii. it’s a production.
a. my grandma’s spread took days to lay out:
swedish meat balls in a hot and sweet brown sauce.
brisket in au jus (of course). mustard dip. farfalle
primavera. caramels, cookies and plenty of vodka.
iii. the main event was held just off the dining room
iv. the adults gathered for highballs and martinis (even though my
grandfather, a liquor salesman, never drank.)
v. this was the night he worked all year for.
vi. a room of family and a wall of presents, that cost money he made.
vii. proof he provided for his children and grandchildren.
viii. things you could touch and say my papa gave me this, this thing.
ix. this is the night, he felt most american
x. most fully
free.

Every institution in Chicago fails Black youth. Our city, as the young poet Malcolm London writes, is “a tale of two hoodies”: a segregated and systematically inequitable city, “a Jekyll-and-Hyde sort of burg” Nelson Algren would say. A town where white kids exist in an increasingly idyllic new urban utopia and Black and Latino kids—whose parents are working and not, due to the lack of jobs and job opportunities on the West, South and East sides, and the increasing abduction of men of color for prison industrial slave labor—weave and dodge through a war zone. Chicago is in America and this is not a new story. It’s a story as old as the country itself, stuck on repeat, blaring out a loud speaker.